Deeplinks Blog posts about Privacy

The FBI wants to ensure everyday people can't use strong encryption. For over nine months FBI Director James Comey has been pushing the FBI's twenty-year-old talking points about why he wants to reduce the security in your devices, rather than help you increase it. Director Comey will appear at two hearings about cryptography on July 8: The first in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, followed by another in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The first line of the opinion issued earlier this week by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court) reauthorizing the NSA’s mass surveillance of telephone records is telling: “‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,’ well, at least for 180 days.” The court’s observation that “the more things change, the more they stay the same” refers to the fact that its opinion allows the bulk collection of phone records one last time, through the end of November. But the court could have also been describing its disappointing business-as-usual approach to deciding how the recently passed USA Freedom Act affected this program.

Across the country, a vigorous debate is taking place in federal and state courthouses about how privacy protections should apply to modern technologies. One of the most spirited issues in this debate is whether the Fourth Amendment requires law enforcement to get a warrant to track a person’s location via their cell phone. This week EFF filed two new amicusbriefs that answer that question with a resounding yes.

EFF, along with eight other consumer-focused privacy advocacy organizations has backed out of the National Telecommunications Information Administration’s multi-stakeholder process to develop a privacy-protective code of conduct for companies using face recognition. After 16 months of active engagement in the process, we decided this week it was no longer an effective use of our resources to continue in a process where companies wouldn’t even agree to the most modest measures to protect privacy.

EFF was joined by ACLU; Center for Democracy & Technology; Center for Digital Democracy; Consumer Action; Consumer Federation of America; Consumer Watchdog; Common Sense Media; and Alvaro M. Bedoya, the executive director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown University Law Center.